A hierarchical and process-oriented framework for disassemblability evaluation in product maintainability design

Disassemblability evaluation is an important part of product maintainability design. Currently, the disassemblability evaluation of complex products is not systematic and complete. The main problems include (1) the existing methods are limited to individual components, ignoring the evaluation of the whole product; and (2) most studies focus on the single disassembly operations rather than a complete process. To address these problems, this paper proposes a hierarchical and process-oriented evaluation framework. Firstly, from the levels of component and product, a two-level evaluation index system is constructed, and the selected evaluation indexes reflect the features of both current operation and previous disassembly process. Secondly, based on Look-up Table, virtual maintenance, and simple algebraic operations, the evaluation indexes are quantified successively. Thirdly, a hierarchical evaluation procedure is presented, which includes two levels and four types of evaluations. Based on the synthetic application of different types of evaluations, the disassemblability of a product can be fully evaluated and understood. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified by a case study of an electronic cabin.